Adaptive resource allocation in FSO/RF multiuser system with proportional fairness for UAV application

Abstract The combination of free space optic (FSO) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be a promising solution to last-mile problem because of FSO high bandwidth and flexibility of UAV. However, FSO is vulnerable to the atmospheric turbulence and transmitter configuration is limited on UAV. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate an adaptive resource allocation strategy to provide relative fair and high transmission capacity for users. In the proposed network model, the downlink scenario is considered and ground station communicates with UAV and its local users by FSO and RF links, respectively. According to the channel conditions and rate requirements from users, channel and power assignments should satisfy the capacity demand in reasonable. To this end, we decompose the original channel and power allocation problem with high computational complexity into low-complexity subproblems, corresponding to channel allocation in RF transmission phase and channel matching and power allocation in FSO transmission phase. Then, a heuristic efficient resource assignment algorithm is proposed to achieve the optimal capacity distribution for users. Numerical results show that the proposed method can asymptotically achieve optimal throughput. Furthermore, system throughput is higher at low transmitting power requirement than those of other existing methods.